In a free market…

I absolutely believe that men and women—collectively; workers—within a company have the right to gather and form a united group—a union of workers—and to use that union as the facility by which they collectively negotiate with the company that employs them. I believe that the subject of the negotiations can be anything the union believes is in the best interest of the workers including wages, job conditions, seniority, safety, etc. Period. End of paragraph.

I also absolutely believe that the company that employs the workers has the right (and fiduciary responsibility to its stakeholders) to define the rules and policies by which they manage their business as long as those rules and policies do not break US federal or state laws. I believe businesses have the right to define a policy that states that they do not employ any person who is represented by a union. Period. End of paragraph.

Now, without governmental protection, let’s see unions compete in a free market where they have to show the advantages of being unionized.

Ready…set…go!

I watched the last 3 episodes of “Top of the Lake” tonight. In the show Holly Hunter played a sort of guru (called GJ), a modern day swami to a bunch of women in a commune like place in an area called Paradise in New Zealand. She had long straight grey hair and wore unflattering clothes but she spoke plainly if not just a little weirdly and she seemed to be able to cut through the bullshit and somehow arrive at the right place. Not necessarily the right answer, she didn’t actually believe in “right” answers, but a place where the person could see themselves better.

A woman, the protagonist actually (Robin Griffin played by Elizabeth Moss), showed up one day on the verge of self destruction as she felt her everything slipping away, disappearing before her very eyes and she didn’t know how to stop from falling off that cliff. She literally threw herself at GJ’s feet in one of the trailers all the women lived in. Ask me later about watching, up close and personal, about 8-10 middle-aged (to north of Grandma aged) women skinny dipping with nothing between them and the water but smiles and wrinkles.

Anyway, GJ immediately asked Robin, who was sitting in front of her, “Are you on your knees” (meaning metaphorically on her knees; crushed, humbled, waiting…) and Robin nodded through tears and obvious pain and said yes…and then GJ said the most profound thing–which is why I am writing this…as it made a significant impression on me–she said (and I may fuck up the wording a bit):

“You must die to yourself. You must give all of this up and let go. Stop helping, stop pushing, stop believing everything you’ve believed until now…fundamentally stop being who you are because you are too big, too important and you are in your own way. You can’t see the road in front of you because you are blocking out the sun. Stop, just stop.”

And I thought about that and it struck a familiar chord, like a song once heard completely long ago that has echoed in bits and pieces ever since but only at important times…never coming in clearly…so that now we expect to hear it when we expect that the time or the moment is important. I think we all can generally understand when we are at those junctures, when the moment is important and we must make a decision…when we hear that song…but we cannot move out of our own way because that moment is too important, or that job is too important, or that marriage is too important, or whatever it is that is blocking out the sun…

…and preventing us from seeing the path we should take. Not necessarily the right path–really who is to say what right is–but the one where we can see ourselves clearly…and by doing so, finally know what we need.

And knowing what we need is what allows us to stand up from our knees…and walk into the sunlight.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

As it happens, I stop and listen to
the nothing (I am a part of) and thus I
  memorialize the world (the vast and
   varied numbers of my synapses, my
    dendrites churning, charging, mapping
     and remapping) by ignoring that it is
      shadows, touches, temperatures,
       scents of a past I neither agreed to
        be part of…or verified as real…with
what we imaginatively call reality being
what we all accept and advance from
  but, ask a bee, an ant, an elephant,
   a whale…a pine tree, a mushroom, the
    mold on bread…any of the billion other
     species all gathered; dusk-stained
      clouds on horizons of filth of dirt and
       disaster, ask them about god, their
        creator…their alpha/omega and ignore
them because we think we know already,
are so very, very sure…and I look at my
  hand, study where the fingers attach
   …close my eyes, see them move, feel
    them a part of me, part of what I am
     and it is my brain only, my thinking
      that makes me who I am what I am,
       where I am and because I have the
        means to recreate inside what I see
and imagine outside we are fool that we
know, that we are the center, the alpha,
  the spindle at the center…but it is exactly
   what I should think, what our brain’s
    shape, size, structure has all conspired
     to create what/how/when we think…the
       smallness and the greatness, electrical
        and chemical, different because of the
number not of the kind so ask an ant, an
elephant or mushroom who is god and
  the lesser numbers of connections will
   just deny them, will not deliver the justice
    of participating in that conversation.

I absolutely love Sunday morning because it’s when I get to read the Sunday paper…the New York Times. If you could be invisible and just stand next to me you’d be startled every now and then with me suddenly rousing out of a semi-coma and sputtering “Fuckers!” or “Fucking Bullshit!” or, the most common, “Fucking Idiots!”. Yes, you might get the distinct impression that I equate the New York Times with sex considering the amount of fucking that’s going.

The reason I get all riled up and, in my empty apartment, yell foul epitaphs seemingly to no one is that the Times is the most liberal leaning rag you can find aside from the Washington Post or MSNBC. Especially the OpEd pages as they are the literary equivalent of a loud and sloppy orgy of sheer liberal bias. The amount of asinine, absurd and innately idiotic progressive liberal ideology found in those pages rivals that of any big government democrat…hell, I imagine Obama would blush reading some of it.

Anyway, an article caught my eye that I thought was particularly brazen in its slant inasmuch that it says that the economy (i.e. the financial system whereas consumers buy products from providers (retail products and services, housing, cars, etc.) who employ consumers who buy products…and around and around) isn’t growing because the government is not taking away enough money from us citizens. Seriously…I really wish I was kidding but the ivory tower liberals on the NYT editorial board really seem to believe this shit. Not only that but it has a HUGE contradiction when it says:

“Underneath it all is the fiscal drag from ill-advised and ill-timed austerity measures. With the expiration this year of the payroll tax break, personal income declined sharply last quarter, forcing consumers to draw on their savings to support their spending. That is unsustainable, presaging weaker consumption in the months to come and, with it, weaker overall growth.”

Which is to say that when the government started taking more of people’s money again (after giving us a little payroll tax holiday) we had less money than before so we used our savings to support buying new TV’s and aluminum siding for the house. After a while, our savings are going to run out which will hurt our ability to buy new shit.

They also write: “At the same time, cutbacks in government spending took a big chunk out of growth, reflecting, in part, the onset of automatic budget cuts under the sequester. The hit from lower public spending will only intensify in the quarters to come as the sequester takes full effect, threatening to push growth below its already paltry 2 percent average.”

This says that when they stopped taking some of our money (meaning we got to keep more of it) this caused us to stop buying new TV’s and aluminum siding for the house and that, the less the government spends (takes from us), the less shit we will buy.

What. The. Fuck.

I’m sure I look pretty funny on Sunday mornings, or at least like I have full blown Tourette’s, but it’s the New York Times fault,

…not me, honest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-economy-is-heading-the-wrong-way.html?_r=0

The media gets paid by advertisers, advertisers make products and services they sell to the public, the public consumes media and therefore consumes the advertiser’s message…millions and millions of times a second all around the earth. That is the media’s business model and it is lucrative and hugely successful. The media truly believes in, and in fact depends upon the adage “you are what you eat” so they feed us the things that provides their clients the most bang for the buck.

Women are fed an impossible standard of beauty and encouraged to hate their own image because of it. Women are fed the lie, in thousands of different ways, that they are less than men, that they need a man to be complete and to be happy and, the worst of all, they are fed the idea that they cannot possibly be happy without the products and services that their advertisers sell.

Men are fed an impossible standard of capability and encouraged to hate their own accomplishments because they can’t live up to it. Men are fed the lie that they can only be happy if they drive the right car, drink the right beer and have the right job…all externally supplied. They are fed the lie that emotion and feelings make them weak and unlovable.

And always, always, always there are mega corporations—the advertisers the media depends on—raining down products and services to “solve” these existential problems. The media depends on us explicitly not loving ourselves and willingly making ourselves psychic slaves of celebrities, movie and sport stars, politicians, really anyone they can exploit and manipulate in order to convince us that we suck, that we’re just pieces of shit and that without their help, we deserve and will get nothing valuable and certainly not love from other humans.

All of that is complete and utter bullshit and the media is deathly afraid you’re going to find that out one day.

Today’s a good day.

Believe, Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

Think about this
when you look at the heavens
past the sky, planets, stars
into galaxies, nebulae,
you see clouds, colors, you
see time itself but, but,
you see it all in relation to you
to our eyes you see the
whole of everything yet
it is too big too wide too
far away to be real to
be there, it’s not, it can’t
be what you see when you
see at all.

Think about this
when you talk to, touch
someone, when your presence
is with theirs, you change
them, you alter their path
ever so slightly so you become
a part of them, you live on
through their motions, their
meanings, their trajectory
out, out, out toward
wherever they are, to
land, to be forever.

Think about this
those Magellanic Clouds
brightly huge and expanding
galaxies, those shimmering
stars so far away so unlike you
so distant that they combine
into weather patterns or
seemingly well someone
some day will be there and
you living through every one
that someone will be
you too.

Almost every day I read something about how we’re supposed to respond to critics and haters by working harder and longer to give them something to really get mad about, how we’re sup[posed to be “just getting started” and that haters should “be careful what they wish for” because meeting or exceeding their expectations are the key to our wellbeing and sense of self accomplishment…

…and I think to myself why should we give them anything?

The moment you agree to be judged by another person or when you compare yourself to them for whatever reason (they are stronger, they are prettier or more successful) then you are agreeing to become their psychic slave, forever in thrall to that aspect of theirs that you so desire. But do you really want your life guided and controlled by someone else? Someone else deciding what style of clothes you wear? The model car you drive? The school you send your children to? The food you eat? The charities you support?

The person you love?

Out of over 7 billion people on this planet you are the only “you” that will ever be made. You are unique and amazing and come fully equipped to meet and surmount every challenge and obstacle life has to throw at you. This makes you the only person you need to look to for guidance and whom you need to learn to love.

Do that and the only comparisons you make in life will be about what makes you happy…and ultimately, all those who you love and love you.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

Very interesting comparison—a good versus evil, nature of man discussion—between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and how they’ve shaped modern society via their influence on the framers of the constitution. I’m in the Locke camp as I prefer to believe that man is essentially good, that existential circumstance tends to bend and force us into straying from that ideal. I am also in agreement with his view of the contract we make with the government and almost entirely opposed to Hobbes’ version as his ideas make no facility available for the relief of oppression, just that it’s (in the form of any government) better than reversion to nature.

While it’s an interesting read, where it fails to connect to today’s reality is that we no longer deal in the gross execution of the powers cited and instead are left dealing with the innumerable minutia that daily bombards us. These billion (and counting) details are the white noise of society—media bias, partisan politics, liberal versus conservative, this program over that program—with which we must constantly filter, compare and contrast in order to arrive at some coherent view of where we, as individuals, exist within the societal framework we’ve intrinsically agreed to. The funny thing, I think, is that this “intrinsic” agreement is manifested by us by not overthrowing the current government. After all, we’re born into it so we don’t actually choose the government at that point. We show our agreement by not violently disagreeing.

Think about that for a second.

Both Locke and Hobbes were brilliant at discerning those macro movements, the contractual relationships between a government and the governed but they did not, nor I believe could not, recreate in words or even conceptually the massively complicated world that exists now. They both identified and advocated very few levers that could be moved to affect society as a whole so extrapolating their concepts has, in my opinion, become so problematic as to render them useless. While they spoke with the authority of a time and place, that authority has been abrogated repeatedly since then, both by science and society itself, until what we’re left with are (regardless their genius) merely echoes and stains left on the collected consciousness.

http://westerncivguides.umwblogs.org/2012/04/17/john-locke-vs-thomas-hobbes-founders-of-modern-political-science/

Individually we can only see that which we intrinsically know, so when we see evil in this world, we are seeing nothing less than ourselves.  Simply put…we are the evil we seek to eradicate.

Each of us asks ourselves a question in order to decide against evil so that eradication can start from within.  A true and selfless love is the answer to that question.  It is always the answer.

Believe.  Go.  Do.

~TrevorZen

Imagine you’re a small creature on a planet circling a star a billion light years from earth. You might be breathing methane, or chlorine or oxygen and it might be -200 degrees below zero…or it might be a blazing 250 above. You scrape at the ground, looking for food, thinking of your family back in the burrow…and at that precise moment, a small planet a billion light years away suddenly ceases to exist. The almost 7 billion people on it all gone in an instant. The billions and billions of animals and insects, trees, bushes, grasses…all gone. Do you know? Does it have any effect on your life, your need to find food…to protect your family? Does reality change for you, that small creature?

Now think the opposite, that you are you looking in the night sky wondering what is out there, what beings exist on other planets, in other places. Would you know or care that millions of planets disappear every day, every hour, with possibly billions and billions of thinking, feeling beings disappearing with them? Does your reality change?

Us humans get so caught up believing things about the universe and reality that don’t exist because we are able to think and question the environment around us. Things and ideas that have no evidence to support them, that have no actualities behind their concepts, we readily accept as truth…as fact. Growing up as the apex predator on this planet we believed (and sadly still believe) in supernatural beings, gods and demons, because in our simple minds it made sense. As we were to animals, someone must be to us…gods, a creator, someone causing the storms, the droughts, the good, the bad. A divine being that made us humans and is responsible for our existence, our everyday lives…

…yet that small creature on that distant planet knows nothing of our gods, nothing of a supreme being focused solely on us humans and the singular and central place we believe we hold in the universe. When this planet blinks out of existence, and it will one day, that small creature will still know nothing about us…and neither will reality nor the universe itself.

What we do have, what makes us unique amongst the species around us on this small insignificant planet is that we can touch, feel and experience love. That is what we should be doing…everyday…to everyone around us…
…and most importantly, to ourselves.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen